


i'm gonna buy this place and burn it down

by perennial



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Modern AU, Older Man/Younger Woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 09:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4701050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History is written by the victors.</p><p>(a different perspective of the kidnap)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm gonna buy this place and burn it down

**Author's Note:**

> "Hades with Persephone captive, through grassy plains, drawn in a four-yoked car with loosened reins, rapt over the deep, impelled by love, you flew till Eleusinia’s city rose to view: there, in a wondrous cave obscure and deep, the sacred maid secure from search you keep…"
> 
> _-Orphic Hymn 18 to Pluton_

Later they will say he is the one who taught her to walk. He crouches before her, the energy brimming in his nine-year-old body briefly put on hold, patiently guiding her path, clearing obstacles, his hands in a protective arc around her as she wavers within them. She lands hard on her bottom and looks at him as though considering whether to cry, but he smiles and makes encouraging noises and claps his hands to make her reach for them, and she emits a baby-chuckle and grabs his index fingers. They resume their journey: his buzzed head leaning close to her dark curls, his skinny knees below the hem of his blue soccer shorts scooting backwards over the ground, leading her forward. Her eyes are intent on his face, her chubby fingers reaching only for him.

-

His parents give him a puppy for his twelfth birthday. It is black as night and trips over paws the size of small plates. It loves him immediately and without reservation.

Her parents do not like dogs and forbid her from playing with it. She is four, though, and she is small and savvy. He lives just across a wide cornfield, close enough that she cannot get lost from her door to his, far enough that her parents cannot see where she has gone. Every afternoon he gets home from school to find the pair of them waiting for him on the front porch, both wriggling with happiness when his face appears around the bend of the long dirt road. They race each other under cornflower-blue skies and through the shadows cast by the aged oaks that grow between the fields and the road.

-

When he is thirteen, he looks out the window of the yellow bus at the troupe of kindergarteners walking home from school. She is skipping down the sidewalk with two of her friends, her backpack bouncing up and down, the bows of her pigtails sliding out of place, her cotton sundress a rainbow of colors. They are blissfully carefree, all three of them hand in hand, faces shining. He can hear them giggling even from this distance, and he can’t help smiling, himself.

-

When she is seven and bold, they go exploring.

She leads their expeditions through the tall yellow grass and within the woods behind his house. They traverse hill and dale, rock and river, his ratty red sneakers following her sure feet. There are scabs on her dirty knees and bruises on her elbows. The black dog lopes along somewhere near them.

They live outdoors, returning home only for the briefest possible intervals. The sun sheds generous light, as if wishing to see, too, what they have found. Their greatest discoveries are an abandoned shed that surely houses snakes, a tire swing with a sturdy rope that flings them out over a gulley, and a fox skull. They dig up arrowheads and broken bottles. They collect mosquito bites and burrs and thorns. The breeze teases her braid loose and her cheeks are sunburned beneath her freckles. The world could go on forever.

When twilight falls they chase fireflies. At moonrise they go inside, trudging back into the confines of four walls to be fed and bathed and forced to sleep, while above them the fat orange moon slowly shrinks and lightens to white, serene in its heavens, promising clear skies on the morrow.

She is determined to know their kingdom from every angle. They scramble up tree after tree, learning the landscape from the top down. They don heavier clothes and crawl through the undergrowth like soldiers. They draw dozens of maps using legends only they two understand.

They construct complicated obstacle courses and at least three hideouts. They build boats of twigs and leaves and send them on missions down the creek. They learn bird calls and pick wild blackberries. They narrowly avoid spider bites and poison ivy. The dirt framing their fingernails is scrubbed away and replenished daily. The sun beams down on them as though casting approval.

"Let's never go home," she says. "Let's stay here forever."

At night they watch all the stars in the galaxy spinning above them. Sometimes his father will bring out his telescope and set it up for them. She is learning outer space in school and points out the constellations. He is learning myths and tells her the stories.

How beautiful it is to exist.

His siblings make fun of him for having a little girl as a playmate. The joke lasts for a few days before it is abandoned and forgotten. After all, there is little amusement in teasing someone who isn’t bothered by it.

-

When she is ten she calls him every Saturday night. She can hear the noise of the dorm in the background, and often asks if he would rather join his friends, but he makes a point of staking out this night as her territory. He cannot think of anything he would rather do than sit with his back against the wall and a bowl of popcorn close to hand and listen to her voice excitedly telling him about her soccer semi-finals, her dread of an upcoming geography test, Farmer Poll’s cows escaping and trotting en masse down Main, who won the town’s pumpkin-carving contest at the Fall Festival and who ought’ve. It is easy to imagine she is right there in the room with him, the life in her voice connecting them from four hundred miles away.

-

She turns thirteen and moody. It is hardly surprising, but he is still surprised. He has always thought her immune to shadows, the way she always seems to drink in the sun. She tells him hormones have nothing to do with anything and what does he know anyway? She kicks him in the shin and calls him a traitor and runs away. He doesn't see her again until he is pulling out of town, his life boxed up and crammed into the trailer hooked up to his truck. She is sitting on the stone wall at the curve where all the evergreens hang over the road. He stops and gets out but by the time he gets around to the other side of the truck, she has vanished into the trees.

At Thanksgiving she tells him about a boy at school, beautiful and golden. He says very little. He tells her about a woman he met in his Torts class who has gone out with him enough times by now for it to qualify as a relationship. She asks one hundred questions and imagines herself subtle.

He spends the entire return flight cross-examining himself, but never asking the right question. His heart quietly withdraws to let his brain have it out. It is a long, heated battle, and there is no victor.

-

When she is fourteen she gets into a fight at school and calls him from the principal’s office. He asks just what exactly she wants him to do.

"You're a lawyer," she says.

"Not yet. Where did you even learn to punch like that? _I_ didn't teach you that. Why aren't your parents there? Call your parents. And make sure they know I didn’t teach you to punch like that."

"Fine," she says, "do nothing," and hangs up.

-

She is fifteen and has lost interest. She doesn't return his calls or answer his emails. When he does finally catch her at Christmas, the first holiday he has made an effort to come home for in two years, she shrugs one shoulder and looks past his ear. "I dunno," she says carelessly, and wanders away, and that is all.

-

He spends three years reminding himself that he doesn’t care if she doesn’t.

-

When he is twenty-six, his sister calls him. "Come home," she says. "It's bad."

The sheriff is the most respected man in town and happens to be her father. Her mother is the local school superintendent and heads almost every board committee in existence. That they could be other people behind closed doors seems impossible. Doing anything to dent their armor seems even more impossible.

He stands in the road and tries to breathe, tries to unclench his fists, because if she sees him like this it will only scare her, but when she looks up there is nothing in her face, nothing at all. She is crouched like a child on the ground at the base of the old oak, the one that they spent a dozen summers climbing, and even the sun that shines through the leaves and dapples her skin cannot mask the yellow bruises on her arms. A new bruise stiffens her left cheek and the cut over her eyebrow is swelling and the blood coursing out of it is absolutely everywhere, but there is no light in her eyes.

She stares at him.

Then she opens her arms and he goes to her and picks her up and carries her to his truck. He buckles the passenger seatbelt and raises his head to hers and finally finds the honesty in her face that he has looked for and that she has hidden for years. He kisses her _hard_ and when he pulls his face away there is blood smeared across his mouth and cheek. He does not wipe it off, and the wind that blows through the open windows dries it as they tear away down the road.

When the dust settles, there is no sign of them anywhere.

**Author's Note:**

> The National Child Abuse Hotline is 1-800-422-4453.
> 
> *100% inspired by this song, which I will never listen to the same way again:  
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO443rg6rx8>


End file.
